Hello, I'm James Wood, and this year on the LRB's Close Reading's podcast, I'm asking,

Who's Afraid of Realism? I'll be taking a range of great novels and short stories,

from Flobe's Madame Bovary and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, up to more recent works

by Amit Chowdhury and Gwendolyn Riley. And I'll be examining what makes and makes

for the real. How does realism produce its effects? What's the difference between artifice

and artificiality? And who is and has been afraid of realism and why? The series starts with

two episodes on Madame Bovary, which you can listen to right now.

And in the third episode, I'll be talking to Adam Thurlwell about Dostoevsky.

You can find a link in the description or search close readings wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello and welcome to the LRB podcast. I'm Jonathan Ray, a contributor to the LRB, and co-host with James Wood

of a podcast series called Conversations in Philosophy, which is part of the LRB's Close Readings podcast

subscription. This week we have an extended extract from our most recent episode on Friedrich Nietzsche's essay, Schopenhauer as

educator. So far in the series, we've talked about Kyrgarde, Feuerbach, John Stuart Mill,

F.H. Bradley, and Emerson. And we will be going on to talk about Jean-Pol Sarch, Simon de Beauvoir, Iris Murdoch, Albert Camus, and Virginia Woolf.

But in this episode, we're talking about Nietzsche's relatively approachable essay, Schopenhauer, as educator, in which he reveals something of what he thinks philosophy is really for, which

is to say it is not actually about learning anything in particular, but it's rather getting a

certain distance from what you ordinarily know.

Hello, James.

Hello, Jonathan.

Now, our assignment for this episode is an essay by Friedrich Nietzsche, who probably has greater name recognition than any other philosophical author.

He has a reputation as an implacable iconoclast.

But we're going to focus on an essay which came out in 1874 when Nietzsche was just 30.

...